Abstract

People with aphasia often exhibit greater than usual frequency and duration of pauses. The manner the spouse reacts to these pauses can have an impact on the following conversation. In order to study pauses, two couples with one member with aphasia were studied in natural conversations which were qualitatively analyzed. Results show that for one couple the husband with aphasia as well as his wife introduced frequent changes of topic following a pause, while for the other couple, the wife appeared to be more tolerant of pauses which permitted to maintain the conversational topic.